An integrated circuit (IC) is a device consisting of a number of connected circuit elements, such as transistors and resistors, fabricated on a single chip of silicon crystal or other semiconductor material. During operation, an IC consumes power causing the temperature of the IC to increase. An overheated IC can potentially result in reduced performance and even operation failure.
A microprocessor is an example of an IC. Because of higher operating frequencies, the trend in microprocessors is toward increased power consumption and dissipation with every new micro-architecture. In particular, server class processors having multiple processor cores are typically power limited by increasing processor density. A processor core typically includes an instruction register, an input/output bus, a floating point unit, an integer execution unit, a L0 cache, and a L1 cache.
To help reduce power dissipation, thermal and power management of multiple processor cores on a single IC is desired. The goal is to achieve maximum compute throughput while keeping the junction temperature below the reliability limit for each processor core.